Humans don’t generally even take the precautions our modems take (speed matching, error correction protocol, error testing) when communicating. But if we did… I mean, we can establish these habits (and some of them are at least attended informally, sometimes)… and I have discussed this and played games with other humans that allow us to explore and exemplify these matters.

“Robinson Schank, while at Yale before moving to Northwestern, conducted a study of the flow of information from one information processing system to another. He concluded that the two systems had to have 17 ‘subroutines’ in common, otherwise the data would be corrupted.”